Step It Out, Nancy vs. Step It Out, Mary —on the folk process and Holly Near's misstep with a Robin and Linda Williams' song

Back before the internet, many songs effectively had no writers. If a song seemed traditional, people shared it assuming that's what it was. Albums were sometimes released with songs miscredited as "traditional" or with no credits at all. Two of my favorite writers ran into this problem. Charles Vess decided to do The Book of Ballads, a graphic album with adaptations of folk songs written by